97 years old and STILL reading the papers...

BROWSING some recent research, I came across a paper about cows that I felt obliged to check.

The paper was entitled ‘Holsteins Prefer Heifers, Not Bulls: Biased Milk Production Programmed During Pregnancy as a Function of Fetal Sex (by Katie Hinde et al, published on bioRxiv, the online preprint server), which reported research showing that cows give more milk to their daughters than to their sons.

This seemed to contradict the theory that most animals feed sons more, because the sons need more energy to achieve reproductive success. Giving more milk to the boy cows will help them grow big and strong, so they can fight off other males when competing for females, resulting in mummy cow having more grandchildren.

On reading this, I walked at once to a nearby field in which I knew cows often grazed and I asked the first one I saw whether she had read the paper and whether the results were true.

“Moo,” she said, hedging her bets.

“The authors of the paper,” I went on, “say it all depends on the sex of the first calf. If it’s a girl, the cow will always produce more milk than another cow whose first child is male.”

“Moo,” she said again.

“But do you realise,” I asked, “that this is not a good reproductive…”

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You’d never catch a cow sending a text message while walking, I can tell you. Even with four legs, we know that texting is liable to make us wobbly

“Moo,” the cow interrupted me, and after taking a deep breath and a mouthful of grass went on: “Surely you have better things to worry about. I just saw a paper, for example, entitled ‘Texting and Walking: Strategies for Postural Control and Implications for Safety’. It reported research apparently showing that people who send text messages while walking may interfere with your gait and pose a risk to safety while crossing roads.”

“Yes,” I said, “I saw that one too. It was in the online journal PLoS One. They did a series of experiments with 26 people walking either with or without a mobile phone, and those with phones were either sending or reading text messages.”

“That’s the one,” the cow said. “But their conclusion seems perfectly obvious to me. You’d never catch a cow sending a text message while walking, I can tell you. Even with four legs, we know that texting is liable to make us wobbly. Four legs good, two legs bad, especially when sending a text message, we always say. You don’t need to do experiments to confirm it.”

“Ah,” I said, “but another paper I’ve just seen may explain everything. It’s called ‘Why Most Published Research Findings Are False’, which was also in PLoS One. Basically the point it makes is that experiments are done to test hypotheses; and hypotheses have to be new, either adding to or overturning existing theories, so a lot of them are wrong; yet results are published only if they confirm the hypotheses. Having lots of dud hypotheses and many experiments will, by pure chance, thus lead to a lot of published papers that are wrong. And the ones that aren’t wrong are often blindingly obvious.”

The cow took another mouthful of cud, masticating while cogitating. Then she nodded wisely and said: “Moo,” which I felt summed it up perfectly.